The opera proved somewhat puzzling—the score representing more a collage of fragmented and incidental musical ideas, and the libretto a turgid, slow-moving mass of purple prose.
The Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Otello is a collection of welcome returns.
There is a deep sense of culmination and finality when we discuss the last works of the great Masters.
Iestyn Davies is, of course, a renowned Handellian, and he sang Handel’s music with clarity, restraint, and precision.
For more than 40 years, the magnificent opening image from Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites has served as an icon for the Met.
The New York premiere of Kopernikus, an opera by the Canadian mystic Claude Vivier, who was murdered in Paris in 1983, three years after its completion.
Even the hit songs in this early Jule Styne musical would recede in a better show.
New Amsterdam Opera specializes in American singers whose abilities are as yet little known.
In the more than 500 years of the history of operas, rarely (if ever) has a coming of age story, particularly one from the child’s point of view, been presented as the main topic of the opera.
Britten’s penultimate opera, the anti-war ghost story Owen Wingrave, was composed for television performance in 1971.
In our current political climate with issues of immigration, tribalism, and white nationalists, the 1957 musical West Side Story has a distinctly contemporary feel.
As you can imagine, oaths are sworn, curses are flung with avidity, and a mysterious shepherd sings a tune of foreboding from a distant mountain gorge just when you’d expect it.
Cycle II represented an embarrassment of musical riches.
Two atmospheric but bleak works provide a musical illustration of the notion that misery loves company.
The story shows what may happen when corrupt individuals occupy positions of trust.
Mozart appears to find promiscuity a source of humor rather than something that is a fundamental problem.
It was quite a pleasure—a privilege, really—to see John Dexter’s legendary production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
At the Metropolitan Opera’s Götterdämmerung on Saturday afternoon, the fires which consumed the Gods burned lukewarm.
In the most hectic and sometimes marvelous year of theater I’ve had in memory, Lady in the Dark at MasterVoices this weekend thrilled me most.
It’s a wonderful idea to cast Bohème with young singers, and these delivered astonishingly assured, confident, mature performances.
All about the life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, but depicted as an opera performed as a dress rehearsal for an opera.
Friday night’s Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera revealed once again a predictable dissonance between the performances on stage and Michael Mayer’s production.
Oh, that slippery Don Giovanni—so elusive, so chaotic, so open to no end of interpretation!
Claus Guth, in a staging of Handel’s Orlando for Theater an der Wien, decided to revisit a PTSD theme.
Tell us: Filth or dementia?
Hasten thee to feed another quarter of conversation for The Talk of the Town!
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